


Tether

by cherry_throat



Category: K-pop, 방탄소년단 | Bangtan Boys | BTS
Genre: Character Death, Eventual Smut, M/M, POV Changes, Run Era, Top Hoseok, Will update tags, Yoongi Is Bad at Feelings, bottom yoongles, but also relief so, but theyre not like, dead, dont worry, just sayin, kind of based off Sense8, run era is superior, theres angst, this really is my baby, trippy shit, you know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 00:39:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14273139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherry_throat/pseuds/cherry_throat
Summary: "He feels it emitted as steam from a hot cup of coffee.And Hoseok can feel every bit of it--like he can touch it with his bare hands. He can taste it like a grain of salt on his tongue.It feels like his own fear, but-- it's not.His lips loosen and his words tumble out before he can refine them properly."You are very scared," he utters."Hoseok and Yoongi may be tethered together somehow...or they're just crazy.





	Tether

**Author's Note:**

> https://open.spotify.com/user/22wfe37k5dhlnw6oqlhyzkvla/playlist/03Cg204CSAEVAJKDYk3KDP?si=Ociho056T2ekQrAjfkajng

Rays of light funnel in from the windowpane, laying slivers of the low orange sun on the hardwood floor.

It’s quiet. Silent, in fact.

Yoongi glances at the walls and their peeling blue wallpaper, curling up a bit by the floor. It’s exactly how he remembered it. The same home he has committed to memory (save for the aroma of his mother's fried walnuts lingering in the air or the nosy neighbors poking in from time to time).

His childhood home.

A house of youth and growth and skinned knees and basketball nets.

He sits at an old copper-colored piano, one foot resting on a gold pedal instinctually as though he has only been away a moment.

A finger touches an ivory key--lightly and not to omit any sound. His fingertips tarry over the keyboard with a feather-like touch.

He’s meeting an old friend. A most comforting sorrow.

He presses down on a key, and a delicate note rings out through the stillness. His fingertips tingle with intimate familiarity and before he knows it, he feels his hand travel over the extent of the white keys.

A steady flow of rhythm echoes through the room and jumps off the steel blue walls, vibrating through his skin.

Yoongi's eyelids close lazily as his hands map out Chopin or von Goethe or Byron--he can’t really recall, nor does it truly matter. The notes reverberate in his bones and he is light and alive. (and alive?)

He recognizes the final stanzas of the piece approaching, the closing lines of the song.

In a second, a rush of anguish moves through his mind; a great wave of crushing grief and he doesn’t know why.

Something is coming.

Something he doesn't know if he wants to meet quite yet.

The back of his eyes sting and he doesn't really know when he began crying but by the final note, warm salty tears are trailed down his face.

His hands still, resting on the keyboard, Yoongi bows his head and closes his eyes. A great, indefinable sorrow floods over him.

In a moment, he senses a presence behind him. Something summoning him.

 

Yoongi pivots his head around to view something on the floor--something that wasn't previously present.

A white flower-- one with long, droopy, lush petals--a tall green stem rests on the floor. Bright and white, opposing the dark hardwood.

A melancholy irritation spurs at his chest and his eyes. An uncertain mourning sweeps through his body because he understands.

He can’t stay.

And that's what makes him cry even harder. He places his hands back on his piano, caressing the worn, brown piano one last time; touching the familiar keys one last time.

Yoongi dubiously stands up, body still racking in subdued cries as his sneakers move away from the piano and nearer to the flower on the floor.

He turns back, gazing at the piano.

His brown piano, his old friend--and the last time he will ever see it.

He inhales and faces the white flower.

Yoongi bends his knees and squats down to crouch next to it.

Just as his fingertip contacts the petal, his stomach lurches.

His vision goes dim, black creeping in through the corners of his eyes like a broken television screen. His home blurs away growing increasingly farther.

At first, it feels like his body is intangible. Like his flesh and bones, fibers and skin have never existed at all. No touch, no itch, no pull of weight, no gravity. He pulses in pure energy, vibration, and soul.

He feels like nothing.

He is falling. Quite a familiar sensation--however that's a story for a different time.

When the black bleeds away, in front of him flashes a vast transcendent plane of glossy void. Glinting in a million different hues and colors--colors that he had never seen before. He falls through the cracks and everything and nothing. The glimmering void encompasses his eyes and eventually his mind and consciousness.   
  
And he is gone. His brown piano and white keys--lost forever.

 

 

He'a in and out for about two weeks. Or something like that. They never really tell him _exactly_ how long he'd been out.

In the beginning, waking up is like emerging from thick waters. He is confined underneath the surface. He remembers detecting sounds. The ebb and flow of a uniform heart monitor. And he hears voices around him.

"Mr. Min, how are we doing today? I'm just going to change your dressings. But I'm pretty sure you don't have any objections."

Min...Wait--That's him. Right?

A white, room comes into focus every once in a while. This sort of thing happens quite a bit. He's not sure how long. He’s never sufficiently conscious of how long anything happens. It feels like a chipped CD, time skipping at random. It takes him a while to reach a point of complete awareness. (Kudos to the sedatives.)

But when Yoongi finally comes around for good, he is frightened.

The room is stark and clean. His head lolls to the side. Multiple other beds and monitors and IV drips line the white walls. He can tell he’s...well...broken.

Yoongi pulls (literally pulls because it really took an effort to move his extremities) his head.

Upon facing the other side of the room he sees a man on the side of his bed. No--more like a boy. But he’s pretty tall--so excuse the confusion.

He is towering and thin with caramel red hair and sharp features.

Yoongi doesn’t recognize him.

Should he?  


The boy knits his brows together and stares down at Yoongi's face.

"You are very scared,” the boy nearly mutters to Yoongi, although more to himself.

Yoongi opens his mouth to speak to the boy, but his words get trapped his throat, the only thing escaping, a hoarse grunt of air.

_Well, duh. I don't know where I am or how long I've been gone or even how old I am!_

How could he forget about that...?

Panic hits him as the boy looks at him with the corresponding expression.

_How old am I?_

He fumbles around with his limbs and begins to lift his arm (harder than it sounds) so he can look at his hands. He desperately needs to see. Yoongi squints at them, but they appeared normal--familiar. No wrinkles or ages spots. He drops his arm back down to the bed, for holding up his own body is deeming rather laborious.

He looks back at the boy, only to find him gone.

Probably just someone else's visitor who wandered over.

_Visitors, huh..._

He wonders if he had had any.

That's when a nurse enters, an older woman. From there she notices his consciousness and calls the army of nurses and a doctor.

The medical staff swarms him like locust. He nods 'yes' and shakes 'no' when he’s required to.

They ask him if he remembers what had happened. What he had done.

He shrugs 'maybe'.

 

* * *

 

Hoseok twists the key and pushes the door to his flat open. He walks through the hallway and into the living room. The four walls are quiet besides the drone of the small television and the young couple in 5F yelling about god knows what. He strains for a moment to hear them.

“Communication”, she’s screaming.  
“I'm Trapped”, he’s yelling.   
  
Hoseok isn’t a snoop. He’s just nosy. It’s not the same.   
  
His knees bend against the couch cushions and he plunges back onto the ratty loveseat. He digs his hand in his pocket and promptly tosses the "Recovery and Rehabilitation" pamphlet across the room to the trash. It doesn’t make it in but lays instead on the floor. He grinds his teeth a bit, gazing at it from the couch.

It's not like he deliberately tried to O.D.

He wasn't suicidal. He was just bored. Or something.

"Oops"

His father and his sister had been sitting at his bedside, sobbing and all he could say was, "Oops"

 

No roommates, but the TV was left on.

No food in the fridge but the dishes are stacked up.

Enough liquor to sate a small village, though he’s one person.

 

 

Hoseok pinches the bridge of his nose, a dreadful headache swarming his skull like a flock of birds.

This children's book he owned as a child taught him that group of crows is called a “murder”. He’s never really liked birds.

He hauls himself directly to the bathroom cabinet and retrieves a bottle of aspirin. Hoseok places the orange pill on his tongue and washes it down with a swig from the bottle of bourbon that he stashed next to the bathtub.    
His mother taught him that every good house has a bottle of _something_ for each room.

As he plants the bottle on the tile floor next to the toilet, a noise arises from the adjoining room.

Hoseok is _not_ a scaredy cat.

He does _not_ screech when he sees a bug, despite what Jimin says. It was a yell--a very manly, masculine yell. And that was a very large, intimidating bug.

He is _not_ afraid of horror movies. He’d just rather watch a coming-of-age movie about a young woman making it in law school despite the odds of her over macho boyfriend. No! He’s not talking about _Legally Blonde._ That’s ridiculous.

There it is again.

_No one has his key, right?_

With his hair on end, he tiptoes out of the bathroom and into the corridor. He creaks open the door to his room, eyes stretching wide when he sees his crumpled covers _definitely_ moving.

_Maybe someone did have his key..._

Hoseok paces as silently as possible via his mattress.

When he approaches the side of his bed, he feels less scared and more confused. He is met by a boy, up to his shoulders under Hoseok’s duvet.

The boy is unknown.

Faded mint green dyed hair splay in his eyes that are ringed in black and blue and red.

To be blunt, he resembles shit, raw wounds dashed across his bruised face.

He lies on his back, uniformly.

However, as soon as the boy glances up to meet Hoseok's eyes, Hose nearly vomits.

He doesn't have an opportunity to question the stranger because his blood runs to ice.  

He encounters a wave-like rush of a cold substance splashing through his veins. The warmth in him bleeding away as he feels a dripping chill in his blood. It reminds him of when he fell off his bike in middle school and they gave him an IV at the Emergency Room.

Not only does he feel this penetrating chill dripping within him, but he senses something else.

His hands tremble and his heartbeat arises. His chest thumps at an alarming speed and his skin prickles amidst perspiration.

He doesn't comprehend how or why--but seeing into the boy's dark watery eyes kicks an anxiety in him. A fear.

But-- the queer thing about this--panic-- it isn't Hoseok's. It's the boy's.

He feels it emitted as steam from a hot cup of coffee.

And Hoseok can feel every bit of it--like he can touch it with his bare hands. He can taste it like a grain of salt on his tongue.

It feels like his own fear, but-- it's not.

His lips loosen and his words tumble out before he can refine them properly.

"You are very scared," he utters.

The boy in the bed shifts a fraction and he opens his mouth.

Hoseok abruptly feels his throat close up, drying like sand, as he looks at the boy's face contort. The boy coughs, more like a choked gasp than anything else.

His features quickly scrunch up in panic and once again, Hoseok's heartbeat trips over itself. The boy in the bed picks up an arm and squints his eyes to inspect at his own hands. Hoseok shakes his head in confusion.

_Who is this? What the hell is going on?_

He glances around the room for something. He finds nothing. Not an answer, a clue nor a hidden camera. It's just his room. Exactly how he'd left it.

He looks back to his mattress, hoping to question the boy.

He finds it empty.

 

Hoseok lurches forward, body flinging toward the bed. He rips the covers off the bed.

Nothing.

He places a tentative hand on the mattress. And he feels it. It's warm. The ghost of a heat against his palm.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> sorry


End file.
